After Pac-12, how about a California Conference?

Dear Cal and Stanford,

Why are you running away from California? Yes, the collapse of the Pac-12 conference — with eight schools departing for conferences with better TV contracts — leaves you without a home for your sports teams. But your desperate appeals to join the Atlantic Coast Conference are pathetic — and a crime against geography. And when that doesn’t work out (Atlantic schools don’t want to share TV sports revenues with West Coast interlopers), what’s next? Playing in the Arab League? Instead, why not take a breath — and a good look at your home state?

You two could bring together universities from across the Golden State to form a new college sports powerhouse. The California Conference.

It’s feasible. Football is the revenue machine behind college sports, and California now has 11 universities that play in the highest division. Two of these schools — USC and UCLA — have gone to the Big Ten. But the other nine — you two, Fresno State, Sacramento State, San Diego State, San Jose State, UC Davis, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and the University of San Diego — could make an entertaining conference for football. These California teams could jump from their current conferences (Mountain West and Big Sky) to a potentially higher-revenue-producing California conference.

For sports beyond football, the California conference could include more than 20 universities, including seven University of California schools, and 10 Cal State campuses. You’d remain the top dogs, academically and athletically, but these schools can hang with you. Take San Diego State, a rising academic power with a solid football program and a men’s basketball program that just made the finals of March Madness.

A California Conference schedule wouldn’t be a big adjustment, because you already play other California schools in many sports. For instance, both of you have a long history of playing football against San Jose State (the Stanford-San Jose State rivalry even has a name, the Bill Walsh Legacy Game, in honor of the late Stanford and 49ers coach, a San Jose State alum).

Sports media executives may question whether intra-state games will draw audiences, but that’s because they don’t understand California. College football is about rivalries between regions, and California’s regions are as populous as most states. I, for one, can hardly wait for Cal or Stanford go to Fresno State with a conference title at stake and the Bulldog Stadium crazies showing more passion than your wine and-cheese fan bases might muster in a decade.

A California Conference would have ancillary benefits. For example, it might revive the Rose Bowl, an essential California New Year’s tradition killed off by the same forces that exploded the Pac-12. Instead of becoming just another quarterfinal game in a national college football playoff — its current fate — the Rose Bowl could pit the California Conference champion against the best available team from the rest of the U.S.

With any luck, this new athletic union would forge more academic collaboration between California-based schools, who face the same threat — a United States that is increasingly hostile to higher education, non-partisan teaching, and California’s liberal values.

It’s going to be hard to justify, to the state and on-campus constituencies, the climate impacts of burning all that additional jet fuel. Teams in the California Conference could get to most games by train or electric bus.

So that’s the pitch — save the planet, save college sports, connect California. Why not take a swing?

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.